James Colgrove ’01 MSPH, ’04 GSAS

Expertise

Public health; sociomedical sciences; higher education; bioethics; immunization; infectious disease.

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University
M.S.P.H., Columbia University
M.A., San Francisco State University
B.A., University of California at Davis

Biography

James Colgrove is the Dean of the Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program at the School of General Studies. Dean Colgrove is an award-winning scholar with extensive experience in teaching, mentorship, and advisement of both undergraduate and postbaccalaureate students. He is committed to contributing to the education of our nation’s future medical leaders and health professionals.

Dean Colgrove has been a valued member of the Columbia community for many years, having graduated with an MPH and PhD from the University and, later, becoming a faculty member at the Mailman School of Public Health. He currently serves as Dean of the Columbia University Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program at GS. Most recently, Dean Colgrove served as the Director for the Master’s Program in Sociomedical Sciences at Mailman.

As an accomplished scholar, teacher, and author, Dean Colgrove’s research focuses on examining the relationship between individual rights and the collective well-being, and the social, political, and legal processes through which public health policies have been mediated in American History. He is well known for his popular undergraduate course, Social History of American Public Health, and has written several books on public health including Epidemic City: The Politics of Public Health in New York (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011) and State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America (University of California Press, 2006). His work has also been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, Science, Health Affairs, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics.